Reaganomics Remembered

by Manuel Garcia Jr. / December 24th, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts is a writer (and former Wall Street Journal columnist) of great moral clarity and a wonderful heartfelt outrage at the economic and social injustices in the United States this last decade, and especially during the George W. Bush Administration. He was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan Administration (1981-1988), and perhaps the lead technician implementing the fiscal mechanisms within the overall economic policy known as “Reaganomics”, which has since become institutionalized as the orthodoxy for managing the United States.

Reaganomics is essentially unlimited military spending, plus a strident and mean-spirited anti-social and anti-environmental bias as regards public spending and the enforcement of regulations, plus an obsession with tax reduction (and elimination) for the highest economic classes, plus an overriding concern that government action invariably results in corporate benefit at the expense of the economic and political interests of labor (organized and unorganized) and the public. (There is no praise for Reaganomics in this article).

A recently published essay by Roberts presents his defense of Reaganomics, and is a response to Robert Reich’s earlier critique of the same (“Reaganomics Redux” ).

I had great difficulty reading through Roberts’ defense of Reaganomics. What follows is my explanation of my difficulty.

I remember Reagan-time well, as it coincided with my early and peak career years as a nuclear bomb-testing physicist. During the last years of the Carter Administration I was unable to find any physics and engineering college teaching job that actually paid (e.g., Proposition 13 had erupted in California, initiating the collapse of public education there, and by example leading the national trend), and even corporate work was not so easy to find, so to nuclear bombs I went. I had been shopping around my new Princeton University Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (a sort of “rocket scientist”). I actually began working in a nuclear weapons laboratory in the second half of Carter’s term, when the post-Watergate political swing to the right (‘the wrong,’ actually) had became overt.

I had a very personal interest in the course of U.S. policy because I wished to apply my high tech skills to solving the “energy crisis” problems that had finally captured public attention with the 1973 and 1979 oil embargoes. There was that window of time between 1972 when the Watergate scandal erupted, and 1978 when Zbigniew Brzezinski was the undisputed master of U.S. policy (which was entirely a visceral Polish hatred of Russia), during which the American public mind was receptive to the idea of a concerted national effort to develop alternative and ecologically sound sources of energy.

During this Ford-Carter window of about six years, there was the last lingering 1960s’ sense of liberating possibilities, combined with the relief and opportunity offered by the “end” of the Vietnam War (in 1975, though covert missions continued for years afterward), and there was also a bracing realism inserted into public consciousness about oil and energy. I had the highest hopes my technical skills (gained with ten years of hard work) could connect to real social progress. I was excited that my personal development and career aspirations seemed to be fortuitously synchronized with the needs and hopes of the times.

Reagan was the total destruction of that dream. His first substantive act as president was the removal of the solar energy system on the roof of the White House, which had been installed during Carter’s term. This was as clear a message as a new Pharaoh in ancient Egypt ordering the defacement of a predecessor’s images on national monuments, or of one male lion who had killed another to win command of a pride (a group of females and their cubs) then killing all the cubs fathered by his beaten rival.

Reagan was a mean-spirited prick, and his administration was rich with similar types. The Reaganauts were careerist pasty-faced near-fascist pirates out to rape the national economy for their corporatist-plutocratic faction. The excessiveness of Reagan’s overblown and patriotic hyperbole was matched by the avidity and crassness of the plundering intent his public speech was meant to cloak.

I’m sure Paul Craig Roberts actually believed the self-serving hyperbole used by the Reaganauts, in the same way many military veterans will believe the justifications used to recruit and exploit them, and which many of them in turn use to maintain their own self-images thereafter. Patriotic myths are used as personal mantras of denial, for example over a functional role as a cog in a larger system that perpetrated war crimes, or as a functionary of military-industrial complex economic parasitism.

Listen to the old soldiers of Spain’s Falange or Pinochet’s military, who become sentimentally patriotic about how they and theirs “saved the country,” while they are much more reticent about their work as torturers and thieves. There are too many similarly self-satisfied veterans in many nations. I’ve heard too many U.S. military veterans (i.e., more than one), who had decades of cushy jobs and subsidized living, whine about “welfare” and “illegal immigrants,” when it is they who represent the most heavily subsidized lifetime-welfare class of them all.

The few veterans we can really respect are those who have wakened up to the reality of what their roles really were, and who actually state these facts. Veterans of this type are invariably anti-war, and invariably for social and economic justice. Someone like Chalmers Johnson, who just recently died, won my grateful and admiring respect with his introduction to his book “Blowback.” He stated unequivocally that he was wrong to support the Vietnam War during the 60s; the student protestors who he and his academic and policy specialist peers viewed as immature, uninformed and uneducated were, in fact, right, while he and the U.S. policy establishment were wrong.

Johnson had enough brains to ascertain the truth, and enough character to admit it, and then go on to change the direction of his work. Yes, this means he was willing to allow the world to see his prior life as a Vietnam War advocate as a wasted effort, as a contribution to human misery. He was a man.

The film “Sir! No Sir!” is about soldiers who went through similar transformations while the Vietnam War raged. See it to be humbled by real patriotism. Was Johnson’s awakening of lesser merit because it occurred after the war? Some might assign lesser merit to individuals who admit much later in life that their youthful contributions to empire produced unnecessary misery rather than social value. In my view, anyone who has this type of realization deserves respect and appreciation, because whenever such an awakening occurs it adds to the positive example to youth, and the wider advocacy of humanistic politics. So hurrah for Chalmers Johnson, hurrah for Daniel Ellsberg, hurray for Ray McGovern, hurrah for Scott Ritter, hurrah for Chuck Spinney, Hurrah for William Blum, hurrah for Jessica Lynch, hurrah for all the veterans against the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and hurrah for Bradley Manning. Whether they came to it early or late, I say hurrah for anyone who is unequivocally against the wars and the imperialism behind them, especially when they graduated themselves out of the troops implementing those wars (whether the shooting wars or the class war).

Naturally, my views on this are self-serving, so I can reconcile my life today with my own contributions to building up the U.S. nuclear stockpile. There are many other current and former weapons workers who prefer to take the apologist tack, like the Spanish Falangists, Chilean Pinochetists, and U.S. military welfare overhead class: “we weren’t trying to enrich ourselves, we were trying to serve the country by ensuring the technology needed for its defensive systems was as robust, reliable and efficient as possible; we were primarily interested to ensure the peace, and to keep people safe.” The implicit psychological message of imperial legionnaire apologist cant is: “Aren’t I holy? Don’t you owe me your gratitude for what I did for your benefit, unseen, all those years ago, when I could have been in the private sector making more money?”

My response is: sorry, so-called patriots, but puffing up your self-images with false history is an insult. Regardless of what you did then, and what you thought you thought then, if you can’t admit the facts about the past you participated in, and which are so obvious today, then I can’t extend my complete appreciation for those good turns you are doing today. Perhaps if I were Christ or Buddha, my charitable understanding would be perfect; but I’m not, and it isn’t. This is my reaction to Paul Craig Robert’s defense of Reaganomics.

Reaganomics was not meant to help most of the American (or any other) people. It was a scheme of larding the rich. That is what it did, and to the detriment of the United States as a nation, a result that was as clearly inevitable then as it is obvious in retrospect today. The American republic of 2010 is a paper-thin shell whose substance was hollowed out by thirty years of Reaganomics dry rot.

One can accept an idealistic politically conservative Paul Craig Roberts believing implicitly in the hyperbole that promoted Reaganism in 1980, but thirty years later? After what we’ve seen it destroy? It seems that in the contest of ego versus truth, ego still dominates here. Of course, that is a personal choice that has its right to be made (our wish about another person’s choice on self-image maintenance can never be imagined as their obligation), but it throttles the appreciation I would prefer to extend unhindered.

31 comments on this article so far ...

Reagan was an evil man. Not only did he conspire with the Iranians to keep the US Embassy hostages imprisoned until after the election, he also met representatives of Central American fascism before inauguration and agreed that they would need to ‘get their hands dirty’ in dealing with popular revolt. The horrors of the 1980s thereupon proceeded with tens of thousands murdered, tortured and ‘disappeared’. Reaganomics was, as David Stockman admitted, a Trojan Horse to get through tax cuts for the rich, tax increases for the serfs, vastly expanded military spending and the later destruction of social provision in spending cuts to pay down militarist/plutocratic spending. After another dose of this poison, under Bush the Lesser, continued by the Master of Lies, Obama, the US has become a fully fledged neo-feudal society with the income distribution, and even more so the wealth distribution, more unequal than ever. And the US continues to terrorise the planet, and its psychopathic ruling business and political caste seem absolutely determined to prevent any action on runaway anthropogenic climate change. I imagine that our highly abbreviated posterity will see Reagan as one of the most evil men in history, and Gorbachev one of the most credulous and fatuous.

NIce piece, Manuel. I sent Roberts a short email critiquing his essay by bringing up some of the points you make here. He told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that yes, the Afghan warlords were freedom fighters and that Reagan’s economic policies were not responsible for the loss of jobs and homes during the 1980s.

u.s or u.s-nato aggression against afgh’n i call a criminal enterprise. but do not view afghan warlords and ulema [body of mullah] as innocent.

the society these parasites and criminals have created is not fit even for asses let alone humans.
that engenders a split in ideology and thus a weakness. rendering the pop a servant or subservient to warlords and masters of people, further weakens this already dysfunctional empire that so many other evil empires invade.

in fact, afghan masters of people [uzbeks, tajiks, azeris, pashtuns] do not differ in-thought an iota from u.s masters or owners of people.
if roberts indeed praises afghan peopleowners, then, he also approbates ownership of americans.
so, he’s consistent! tnx

I concur. I addressed this in an email to Roberts a couple of years ago when I found myself agreeing with his regular posts on Counterpunch and his credits as a former Reaganomics stalwart. He maintained the Reagan creed, bending not one iota and seeminly finding some sort of intellectual reconciliation/rationale while damning all US economic and foreign policies which have their seeds in the Reagan administration. Baffling!

I, like you, have no issue with the evolution of thought, but to stick to one’s guns on a past that is the basis of your argument against the present is hypocritical, and with a taint of pathology (thus raising questions about his motives).

I would add to my last point concerning motives, ego is probably the only thing that seems to make sense. A man who is desire to always be right while contradicting himself, seems to be so full of himself that he is blind to those contradictions and (as bozh notes) must reject others when confronted with those dissonances.

This is an excellent article.
I too, was an admirer of Paul Craig Roberts, thinking that he realized the evils of Regeanomics and became repentant. This continued until couple of years ago when he wrote an article in defence Reaganomics and saying that it was not the reason for the huge deficits then or now.
When I wrote to him protesting the obvious error of his thinking, his answer to me, was like the answer he gave to Ron Jacob, which was a curt statement that I didn’t know what I was talking about.!! He didn’t explain why was that!!!??

2) Manuel Garcia Jr. is on record bluntly and appropriately detailing the hopelessly counterproductive ignorance and stupidity of nine-eleven-was-an-inside-job conspiradroid-moonbats and moonbats-in-general:

Paul Craig Roberts’ general moonbattery should come as no surprise to Manuel Garcia Jr., or anyone else, for that matter.

Soliciting empathy or intelligence from moonbats will get you nowhere, fast.

But that’s what the Left-in-name-only (Lino) insists on doing, time and time and time again, to no avail (other than abundant tomfoolery and embarrassment).

The Lino’s continual shock and frustration with their moonbat “allies”–as well as the Lino’s consistent willingness to apologize for their moonbat “allies”–would be amusing, if it weren’t so predictably tragic.

Everything that I have read that Paul Craig Roberts has written tells me he is one of us, that is an evil politically correct leftist liberal progressive who thinks poor people are entitled to human rights. If your description of his argument on his essay on the Reagan years is correct then the thoughts in the essay are not in tune with the thoughts behind his current writings. Accept the inconsistency, whatever he believes about the Reagan years he is now more an ally than an enemy,

“The Evil One”, Yes I would caution any anti-Roberts sentiment regarding his current incarnation. The issue is his seeming inability to acknowledge his past and to, as posters here has said, instead actually defend it. His defense is not even an attempt to engage in argument but to dismiss those who would confront him on his contradiction, with a dismissive “know it all” brush-off.

That undermines what he writes, and makes one wonder if rather than speaking truth, he is simply an angry person who has yet to grapple with his own inconsistencies and to build a better future. We’re loaded with critics, but most are not responsible – freedom is, after all, an unbearable responsibility far too many wish not to undertake. Rather than looking at the symbol of USA empire (Obama) as the one who will SOLVE our problems…we should stand up and take back our freedom. However, most would rather complain and whine like the Tea Party and those who think there are only “enemies” out there to paw at on DV.

Roberts gets some things correct concerning the current state of the Yankee Reich, and some wrong concerning the evil Reagan regime, at least in my opinion. I doubt that we are ‘correct’ all the time, even in our own opinions. It can be very hard to admit error, or so I’ve been told.

It seems that in the contest of ego versus truth, ego still dominates here.

Such an remark while on the surface may seem reasonable especially to those who loath Reagan as many do here but is in actuality rather simplistic. Without a NUANCED analysis we miss several key aspects about PCR. I don’t think you can dismiss PCR with the “ego” label.

As Roberts writes …

I would like to offer a different perspective. Reagan came to Washington to put an end to stagflation and the cold war. Keynesian demand management had the wrong policy mix. Easy money pumped up aggregate demand, but high tax rates reduced the response of supply to demand. Consequently, prices rose. The problem was reflected in worsening “Phillips curve” tradeoffs between inflation and employment. As time passed, higher rates of unemployment were required to bring down inflation, and higher rates of inflation were required to boost employment.

Washington was concerned, including Democrats in Congress, because stagflation threatened every category in the budget.

The supply-side policy, which some label Reaganomics, reversed the policy mix. Monetary policy was tightened to lower aggregate demand, and marginal tax rates were reduced in order to boost the response of supply.

This is in NO WAY (for those who want to create strawmans) to justify Reaganomics but this is an OBSERVATION that by the time of the Carter Administration, Keynesian demand-side economics (aka the New Deal aka economic Liberalism) was running out of steam especially to the Capitalist class. Keynesian economics couldn’t resolve the stagflation of the 1970’s. And while the stagflation was resolved via supply-side remedies, the resolution had harmful consequences to working people and to the society at large.

Clearly there is a huge denial going on about what caused the stagflation of the 1970’s. Part of it was due to monopoly Capitalism, the beginning of the attacks on labor, and the oil shocks due to U.S. support of Israel — another reason why the pseudo-Left blames “oil” rather than Zionism.

The oil shock of the 1970’s was the major cause of the stagflation. The oil shortages cause huge price inflation throughout the economy and the elites decided that to control the inflation they would send the economy into a recession. Extending Keynesian measures would not have resolved the stagflation. What would have resolved the stagflation that would be less harmful to labor was the nationalizing of the oil companies and freezing prices. However such a radical policy is never on the radar screen of the Capitalist class.

Therefore both Reich and Roberts are wrong but this is the limit of the economic discussion in polite company. These same limits are why there’s going to be no end to the current Capitalist crisis any time soon and why there needs to be a reinvigorated Left to present radical idea.

Unfortunately, once again I direct attention to the pseudo-Left and their actions of sabotaging the 2004 Nader campaign at a time when it was vital to build a Left alternative to the Democrats. Even Progressive Democrats and the so-called “Progressive Left” are not advocating for a complete ROLLBACK of the 1981 Kemp/Roth tax cut which would essentially demand the rich pay back the tax EXPENDITURES the people of the United States paid to them. No their solution is austerity. So unless we get RADICAL on THEIR ass many people will be left abandoned and exposed.

I would add to my last point concerning motives, ego is probably the only thing that seems to make sense. A man who is desire to always be right while contradicting himself, seems to be so full of himself that he is blind to those contradictions and (as bozh notes) must reject others when confronted with those dissonances.

Reaganite economics was more about the Laffer Curve, than the Phillips Curve. Neo-liberal economists like these little pretenses of scientific rigour as they think that make their obscurantist cult look rational. Of course the Laffer Curve was ‘Laffer-bull’, designed to put a gloss on parasite class larceny. The last time I saw it mentioned was a few months ago when Julie Bishop, a vapid nong-nong in Rightwing Australian politics was convinced that peddling it would advance her brilliant career. After the laughter broke out she dropped it quick smart. Someone had, I imagine, set her up, and she fell for it. Of course it appeals to the more stupid members of the avaricious class, so it will be back.

Deadbeat “the is a word I have a problem with because on the surface it’s just an article, but it is a definitive article when a, and indefinite article, would have been so much more appropriate….and would have been less, but not quite, pseudo-leftist. But then Max wouldn’t understand that!!!!”

Mulga – Julie Bishop, apart from being a obvious supporter of the little terror state, seems to be thick from the neck up.

‘In 2010 Bishop defended the suspected forgery of Australian passports by Mossad, saying that many countries practiced the forging of passports for intelligence operations, including Australia.[15] This drew criticism from the government, who questioned her suitability as a decision maker in Australian foreign policy.[16] She later claimed to have been misunderstood and issued a statement indicating that: “I have no knowledge of any Australian authority forging any passports of any nation.”[17]’ Wikipedia

Deadbeat at least two commentors here (including myself) and the post author had direct communications with Roberts. You, I would guess, have not. This is a perfect example on your part to overreach with your “pseudo-analysis”. I’ve tempered my remarks on Roberts, because unlike you I do not wish to condemn someone because of his history.

Reaganite economics was more about the Laffer Curve, than the Phillips Curve. Neo-liberal economists like these little pretenses of scientific rigour as they think that make their obscurantist cult look rational. Of course the Laffer Curve was ‘Laffer-bull’, designed to put a gloss on parasite class larceny. The last time I saw it mentioned was a few months ago when Julie Bishop, a vapid nong-nong in Rightwing Australian politics was convinced that peddling it would advance her brilliant career. After the laughter broke out she dropped it quick smart. Someone had, I imagine, set her up, and she fell for it. Of course it appeals to the more stupid members of the avaricious class, so it will be back.

I agree that Reaganomics was much more about the Laffer Curve and your point about Julie Bishop is well taken. But my point is that we should equally break out in “laughter” when Keynes is resurrected as politicians and economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich juxtapose their Liberal bromides against Reaganomics. I don’t find too many folks laughing here. Frightfully, they are being taken seriously.

Deadbeat at least two commentors here (including myself) and the post author had direct communications with Roberts. You, I would guess, have not. This is a perfect example on your part to overreach with your “pseudo-analysis”. I’ve tempered my remarks on Roberts, because unlike you I do not wish to condemn someone because of his history.

Max you twist commentary around better than old Chubby Checker on the dance floor. It was YOU who suggested that EGO is why PCR cannot see the errors of his ways. I’m the one who prefers to find a deeper analysis of PCR’s motives.

Unlike you, I accept PCR’s explanation that he was trying to resolve the stagflation of the 1970’s. Keynesian economics reached its limits and couldn’t resolve the stagflation. The Carter Administration solution was to raise interest rates to 21%!!!

Therefore to simply dismiss PCR explanation as ego is useless to fully understand the limits of Keynesian economics which the Liberals are attempting to resurrect as a solution for the current crisis. Also by understanding the stagflation of the 1970’s one then find the role that U.S. relationship with Israel was a leading cause of the oil producing nations oil boycott in 1973 and the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.

This is the difference between your surface dismissiveness and deeper analysis that attempts to pull these threads together.

mary, Julie Bishop knows the one absolute axiom of politics in the West-you must never, ever, offend the Judaic Herrenvolk in any way whatsoever. As the laughably inadequate Gillard showed when she rushed to slavishly support the massacre in Gaza. And as Rudd showed by negative example when he put the integrity of Australia’s passport system before the Zionazi lust for ritual murder over the killing in Dubai, then was topped by several of the most egregious Zionist stooges in the Labor Party, and the Murdoch media sewer, ‘to encourage the others’. But there is occasionally some good news, like seeing Khodorkovsky bunged up for another decade or two, despite the virulent hissing and spitting of the Judaic supremacists and their Sabbat Goy stooges. The BBC World Service has been, as ever, hilariously and contemptibly biased, arrogant and craven in its groveling to the Master Race.

Deadbeat (redux with corrections),
Without doing a google search could you please clarify your view of the Phillips curve. And when you finish please put on your boots…because you’re walking deeper than you think into some serious cow droppings.

‘But there is occasionally some good news, like seeing Khodorkovsky bunged up for another decade or two, despite the virulent hissing and spitting of the Judaic supremacists and their Sabbat Goy stooges’

The US and Germany have voiced serious concerns about a second guilty verdict against the jailed Russian former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man and considered a political threat to PM Vladimir Putin, was convicted at a new Moscow trial of embezzlement.

The White House said it was “deeply concerned” by the verdict, calling it a “selective application” of justice.

mary, they’re just Sabbat Goy stooges trying to please their masters. The Rothschilds invested a lot of money in Khodorkovsky, and they don’t like being rebuffed by mere goyim. The other Jewish plutocrats who prospered under the corrupt and bibulous Quisling Yeltsin, were less arrogant than Khodorkovsky, who fancied himself to become the boss. But as the Judaic plutocrats in the West could have told him, its not a good look taking over yourself-far better to let the goyim follow orders, as in Canada, the US and Australia, while the Chosen Ones pull the strings.

Mary can you not find an appropriate place for you remarks here. Really cannot see what Judaic supremacists and their Sabbat Goy stooges has to do with this thread.

DB Now that’s I’ve discussed the article you copied the Roberts’ remarks from, I can better address. It is addressed to Rober Reich, a follower of Keynsian economics. While he may be adquately addressing his rationale; it is a far far cry from the Roberts who howls at everything every US president does with disdain that is nearly incomparable…and he goes far beyond even what I post about the imperial Amerikan empire.

So this little intellectual neo-classical economics lesson he provides to demonstrate his adherence to the mainstream is really what Mr. Garcia and I find a tad…well….hypocritical. Just say you were once on the dark side and have seen the light. You can say what your rationale was but understand that that rationale is in total opposition to the outcries you now spew on Counterpunch and elsewhere. Own up and you’ll get much deserved respect, Mr. Roberts.

Dear Mary, it is directly from your post above. I’m not twisting anything. If you want to take your Judaic supremicists talk some where other than this…I won’t have to “twist” anything (where have I heard that misguided comment before?)

Jeffrey St. Clair’s article “How Green Became The Color Of Money” describes the anti-environmental appointments during the Reagan Administration, and adds to the picture painted by the previous articles:

The rabidly exploitative nature of Reaganomics is shown. The 2010 BP Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is an incident that fits in perfectly with the pattern of Reaganomics, as it continues in our day.